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Edgeware’s VP Product, Johan Bolin, has written an article for BroadcastPro Middle East, where he discusses combating OTT content piracy. In the piece, titled, Catch content thieves in the act,Johan highlights how piracy is an ever-evolving problem for content creators and owners and new higher resolutions such as 4K will only make the problem worse.

He argues that while manifest-based watermarking can help, an emerging watermarking technology could be the answer to this growing and costly problem. The new bitstream-based forensic watermarking tool which watermarks from the edge of a dedicated Edgeware TV CDN, inserts a unique watermark directly into the bitstream, on-the-fly. Johan says that the best approach to make sure content survives the CDN is to manipulate the bitstream for each individual viewer.

The process only requires a few byte changes that can be performed by specialized servers on the edge of the network as they stream content. Just before delivery to the end-user, the system identifies just a few pixels within the picture’s frame and changes them in a way that’s completely unnoticeable to the viewer.

Compared to manifest-based watermarking, the new bitstream-based watermarking can be embedded much faster – at a rate of several bits per second. It’s also much harder to cheat this watermark so pirates can be identified much quicker.